Saturday, August 5, 2017

Backfire!! The Attorney General's Missteps on Affirmative Action

Sometimes, bold policy initiatives can have exactly the opposite impact of what was intended. No better example of this was the suggestion that the Department of Justice was considering suing universities accused of discrimination against whites in their admissions policies. The main result of this was not a groundswell of sympathy for aggrieved white applicants, but an outpouring of commentary pointing out that the major beneficiaries of college admissions preferences were children of the rich! More remarkably, one of the most quoted examples of this unseemly pattern was how the admission of Jared Kushner, the President's son in law, to Harvard was engineered through a 2.5 million dollar contribution fromhis father to the school

As someone who has been arguing this for years, based on solid research that I have shared with my students, I was astonished to see this analysis go public with such force and visibility. And I have to thank the Trump Administration and particularly Attorney General Jeff Sessions, for creating a climate which allowed this important discussion to get a public hearing.

One of the titles of the books I use speaks volumes on the subject "Color and Money: How Rich White Kids Have Won The War Over College Affirmative Action"

Thanks to Attorney General Sessions, the subject of Affirmative Action discourse has shifted from Favoritism to Minorities to Favoritism to the Rich.